Music and Antisemitism

It is perhaps surprising that the week in which 'subjectivity in Gustav Mahler's symphonies' was the topic of discussion I failed to find anything interesting to write about. Issues of anti-Semitism around Mahler's career and reception have been studied in depth elsewhere (I now have a copy of Knittel's 'Seeing Mahler' and intend to read it over the winter vacation; Adorno's writings on Mahler are also on my list).  My thought when a tutor remarked that Mahler's annotation of the word weh 'pain' at key points of his manuscripts showed a rupture of self-aware narrative in the music, however? Weh = Vey  = Mahler is a serial kvetch. Bibliography: Abbate, C. (1991). Unsung voices : Opera and musical narrative in the nineteenth century (Princeton studies in opera). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Barham, Jeremy. (2007). The Cambridge Companion to Mahler (The Cambridge companions complete collection). Cambridge University Press. Greene, D....

Last year, being a budding composer, I was excited to see an advert for a competition to set a psalm (or an excerpt/collection) for choir and organ. What persuaded me most to enter was the option to use original Hebrew text. I chose Psalm 118 ('Hodu l'adonai ki tov, ki l'olam khasdo', which forms the end part of Hallel) due to its regular rhyme scheme, call-and-response like lines, clear sections, and broadly cyclical structure. The music was composed sympathetically, I believe, and ended up sounding quite post-minimalist, with outbursts of Gustav Mahler-inspired expression and some lovely quartal harmonies. All finished, the piece was sent off to be judged; the results email that returned exposed a deep problem and misunderstanding of Jewish music within the English choral tradition. Three things stood out.  Firstly, the gist was that the composition would have won, but that due to the complexity of the Hebrew, the choir would not be able to learn it in time for the co...

Compared to Marina Frolova-Walker (see my previous post), Richard Taruskin is on the ball. Despite his penchant for extremely long sentences and words that only he seems to know the meaning of, Taruskin sets an example for raising issues of anti-semitism in his musicology, analysis, and history. In his book 'Defining Russia Musically', not only is there an index entry for 'anti-Semitism' - and 'anti-Semitism of,' for various composers - but chances to talk about it are grasped fully. No composer, critic, or musician who exhibited anti-semitic views is left unexposed, and rightly so: to pass over anti-semitism is to discount its validity as a form of racism. This means going after Mily Balakirev, Modest Mussorgsky, Pyotr Tchaikovsky; even Mikhail Glinka, whose personality is seldom revealed in literature. A large section is also devoted to Igor Stravinsky's active support for fascism in Italy and the Third Reich; the extent and explicitness of his hatred for ...

A book with the title 'Russian Music and Nationalism' is always going to be ambitious; a book with that title and only 400-odd pages is always going to leave some things out. Marina Frolova-Walker's book of that name, however, makes a notable emission which I could not leave unmentioned. Of course, Frolova-Walker's exploration of the music of Glinka and the Kuchka is fascinating and extremely well-researched, but there is a plain ignorance of Jews throughout. Not only is there no index entry for 'Jews' - as might be expected given the millions-strong population in Russia during the nineteenth century - or 'Jewish (folk) music' - as might be expected given the strong influence on generations of non-Jewish Russian composers - but there is a clear avoidance of Jewish matters when dealing with Jewish composers. In a rare passage on Anton Rubinstein, a successful performer and composer from Podolia in the Pale of Settlement, Frolova-Walker writes: 'For th...